June-July Update

Saturday, 11 July 1998

It's been, what, a month since I've written anything here. And a pretty busy month, too. I've signed up with Web-Staff, the temp agency I mentioned as having the least-sucky web page. They haven't gotten me any work yet, though. I've been doing some contract work for Crossover, evaluating financial websites.

Last week, after some miscommunication having to do with the annual NYUSFS Ferry Meeting, I rebuilt the NYUSFS website. Follow the link if you want to know what I'm talking about.

Chris is away at Contata this weekend, as are Lisa and Josh, the folks with whom I generally share travelling and hotel expenses with when attending ReaderCon, which is also this weekend. I'm not attending either convention, since I can't afford to and ought to be saving up for BucConeer anyway. So I've got the apartment to myself. (Sorry for that rather icon-heavy paragraph.)

Doing a laundry that I probably ought to have done earlier in the week killed a couple of hours. After that, since the weather's so nice, I took the newsprint pad and charcoal pencils I bought at Pearl Paint the other day and went out to do some sketching. (I neglected to bring the clips I'd also bought to hold the loose end of the pad cloased, and so had to spend more time then I liked fighting with the wind.) First sketch: The Grand Army Plaza arch, from inside one of those marble gazebo-like thingies at the north end of Prospect Park. Not very good. So I spent a few minutes doing quick gestural drawings of passers-by, which was a bit better. Then I walked about for a bit. I considered sketching the fountain in the middle of the plaza, but the was the tail end of what looked like it had been a wedding there. Walking back towards home around Plaza Street East, I sat down on a bench at the corner of St. Johns Place and was struck by the contrasts between the colors and angles formed by the edges of some buildings, so sketched that, which turned out to be the best sketch of the day.

Speaking of gazebo-like thingies, I finished John Barnes's One for the Morning Glory the other day. It's a light fantasy, reminiscent of William Goldman's The Princess Bride in many ways, though with a darker tone. The dark and disturbing bits of Morning Glory really are pretty dark and disturbing, while those of The Princess Bride are mostly just humorous. One of its amusing features is Barnes's use of odd words. He uses existing words in ways that make it clear from context that he's giving them new meanings. The characters fire pismires, omnibuses, and festoons, wear triolets, and go off into the woods to hunt zweiback and gazebos. I found it funny at first, but the humor wore off after the first few chapters. Fortunately, there was plenty else in the book to keep me interested. I couldn't help but wonder if Barnes had heard the gazebo story, famous in RPG circles.

On the way home, I bought some Chinese food and stopped off at Blockbuster to pick up a couple of videos to watch over the weekend. I grabbed The Fifth Element, which I've heard was stupid but fun, and looked around for Gattica, figuring that I might as well see the rest of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo award slate, even if the voting deadline was yesterday. I couldn't find it, but did find a copy of Aeon Flux, a great series of surreal animated SF shorts, which I'd only seen bits and pieces of up till now, about a high-tech terrorist and her enemy/ally/lover who rules the despotic society which she's either trying to bring down or trying to defend, depending on which way you interpret things. Sort of how Spy vs. Spy would turn out if it ran in Heavy Metal magazine. Both of these videos are rented for five nights, so they'll still be here for Chris to watch if she has time before Wednesday.